There is a real challenge in thinking about how best to train in martial arts. What does good teaching look like and what should students do. In this blog I want to combine my experiences as a secondary school teacher of 15 years with about the same amount of time learning SV.
What does it mean to learn something?
In educational research are the following definitions;
Memory is the residue of thought - Daniel Willingham
learning is a change in long-term memory (Kirschner, Sweller and Clark, 2006)
These, though I believe true about academic study, clearly are not sufficient for martial arts. For a skills based endeavour I would adapt the above as follows:
Habits are the residue of practise
Learning is a permanent change in habits
If you accept this premise then consider the learning of martial arts. Two extreme cases are as follow:
Type A: Has complete knowledge of form, technique and principles. Has committed this knowledge to long term memory.
Type B: has practised movements to the point where movements are habitual without conscious thought.
Many might read this and opt for B, but remember:
Practise makes permanent (not necessarily perfect)
So correct practise is required which is some optimum of type A and B. This is the HOW of martial arts, this is where a teacher really makes the difference.
The transferring of knowledge is one of two important steps in the teaching and learning process. Therefore showing you a technique/movement, even giving you all the science behind it, isn’t in and of itself enough from a teaching and learning point of view. What is useful is found in the methods for ‘how do you practise’ or ‘train’ it.
Taking my go-to-analogy of football (soccer), or just sport in general, very little is secret in terms of the end product. Millions watch the games and thousands of experts talk, write and speak about it. So what then makes a coach some sporting genius and successful?
The answer is what they do on the training pitch. That’s what they want to keep under wraps. In fact there was a famous incident of a team secretly watching the others training sessions just this season gone. And so it is with all physical endeavours, though certain knowledge is key - it is just an inkling if not imbibed somehow. Knowledge must be ingrained, it must be lived in martial arts - not just known in an academic sense. We probably know lots of people who can talk through a fight.
There is a lot of danger therefore in arts where you have a hierarchy of forms/styles and the objective becomes to climb a ladder. I would certainly say this is a pitfall that needs to be avoided in Shastar Vidiya as the art requires that skills and attributes are built upon and so the whole is preserved and nurtured. So in a typical Indian sense the journey is non-linear. This danger of just pushing up the ‘grades’ is one that misses the steps of purposeful practise and simply making ‘knowledge’ akin to ‘ability’.
Purposeful Practise
In martial arts this can be particularly difficult as in the past the purposeful practise may well have been found in many encounters of violence or belonging to some tradition where you had long periods of exposure to the art. However, in the much more peaceful and busy times we live this is generally not the case. On the traditional ‘go live the art in a school with a master’ approach - teaching and learning didn’t need to fit the criteria I have outlined. With long intense periods of contact one could learn habits by osmosis from just being so absorbed in this single minded pursuit. So by our 21st century standards the teaching probably was poor in the sense that little was explained or expounded upon etc. But the ingredient they did have is long periods of practise - even if that was just do as I do. As this is hard to replicate now, teaching needs to actually be ‘better’ or different - and more towards the ideas I have come across in educational and sporting research.
Hence, finding purposeful practise is difficult because you may well be needing to reinvent the wheel in your art.
Mastery learning
Beware of chasing goals, it is all too easy to chase new shiny things. It takes more discipline and dedication to stop, take stock and work at the level you are at until it is truly mastered and honed. See new knowledge as aspirational and perhaps a corrective to what you are doing (i.e. does your current path lead to it?).
Mastery (to have formed habits) is key, better to master a small set than to be a novice of a large set of martial forms/techniques. Better still - mastery will also lead to exponential growth as the foundation you are building upon is solid and unwavering allowing you to increase the load on it over time. This is why it seems some people aren’t just better than you, but keep getting better at a faster rate than you.
In conclusion
Having some teaching responsibility now in SV and being part of an Akhara trying to preserve this grand art I think deeply about how it is being and should be taught. There’s lots of things I have seen work but equally many that do not. What works and doesn’t work is subject to the times we live in and the kinds of people who will attempt to learn this art.
My feeling is that there will need to be a generation or two who can both learn the art in some traditional sense and then find ways to pass it on differently. I count myself in one of these generations and so the challenge is to think of ways of helping others to practise and form habits that will allow them to then absorb the vast martial knowledge SV has to offer. At the moment my fear is that the access to the knowledge is there but not the means to digest it. My Gurdev once said:
‘A Guru can lay a feast out for you, how much you eat is one thing, how much you shit out is another - what matters is how much you digest’.
For these reasons the best I can do for the reader is say self discipline, self reflection, honesty and, above all, hard work are paramount in your own practice.